A masonry oven, also known as a brick or stone oven, is an oven including a baking chamber in which a fire is lit. Though traditionally wood-fired, coal-fired, natural gas fired or even electricity fired ovens are possible. Modern masonry ovens are often associated with artisanal bread and pizza, but in the past they were used for any cooking task involving baking. These ovens are often built by a skilled mason and therefore typically expensive to the point where people usually do not have them in their homes or in an outdoor barbeque area.
FIG. 1 shows a typical oven being hand built from brick. A cement or masonry floor 100 is constructed and each course of brick 102, 104, 106, 108, 110 is laid up and allowed to set sufficiently before the next course is added. Alternatively an oven can be cast from concrete, however a mold for such a casting is often constructed on site, and is another costly and time consuming structure to build. The mason maintains the circular shape of this oven with a compass like device 112, which similar to a plumb line for vertical surfaces, allows the mason to maintain the shape of each course as a circle and each course being in reduced diameter to form a dome. Needless to say such a brick by brick process is expensive and time consuming to construct. And if not done by a skilled mason the result can be an oven that does not heat properly, and that may be less than pleasing to look at.
The direct-fired masonry oven is often called a “Roman” or “black” oven, because of its origin. It is called a black oven because the smoke from the wood used as fuel sometimes collects as soot on the roof of the oven. As previously stated masonry ovens are not easy to construct, however the ovens were in wide use throughout medieval Europe and were often built to serve entire communities, where the owners or local governments that built them might charge a fee for their use. Such ovens are still in wide use in artisanal bakeries and pizzerias. Also, in the pre-Columbian Americas, similar ovens, called by the Spanish term hornos, were often made of clay or adobe. This construction technique has been used since antiquity, and does an excellent job of baking various items. However modern technology has provided a somewhat satisfactory solution to building a custom built masonry oven.
FIG. 2 shows an table top pizza oven 200 constructed of metal and other modern materials. Such ovens are used in commercial settings, but tend to be expensive, aesthetically unappealing, and they do not store and radiate heat like a masonry oven. However such an oven may be somewhat light weight, and easy to ship and install. However, many people still prefer bread and pizza that has been cooked in a masonry oven, and may find the modern metal oven a poor substitute for the masonry oven.
People are unable to easily, and economically create a pizza oven out of cast high temperature concrete. Prefabricated ovens, often shipped in pieces, are heavy to ship and expensive. It would be advantageous for a homeowner or consumer to be able to build a cast pizza oven with a onetime use mold, with far less cost (Do-it-yourself vs. a machine made oven) than a custom built oven to carry out artisan baking in their home or yard.